Turn Sublime Text into a Task Manager with the PlainTasks Plugin

Productivity Sauce

Oct 10, 2012 GMT

Dmitri Popov

While Sublime Text is a powerful text editing tool, you can put it to other practical uses through third-party plugins. Take, for example, the PlainTasks plugin. It turns Sublime Text into a simple yet flexible task manager. The plugin uses a plain text file for storing tasks, so you can easily synchronize it across multiple machines and open it in any other text editor.

The easiest way to deploy PlainTasks is to use the Sublime Package Control tool (see the Installation page for instructions on how to install Sublime Package Control). In Sublime Text, choose Preferences | Package Control, select then the Install Package command, type PlainTasks to locate and install the package. To create a new task file, press Ctrl+Shift+P to evoke the command palette, type task, and select the Task: New document command. All actions in PlainTasks are performed using keyboard shortcuts. The Ctrl+Enter or Ctrl+I shortcut can be used to create tasks, while the Ctrl+Shift+A shortcut lets you mark the currently selected task as completed. You can group tasks into projects as well as assign tags to individual tasks. In short, if you already use Sublime Text as your preferred text editing tool and you would like to use it for managing tasks, PlainTasks is right up your alley.